Illicit Economies and State(less) Geographies: The Politics of Illegality

This special issue of Territory, Politics, Governance brings together emerging scholarship that explores relationships between clandestine economies and the political geographies of law enforcement. Such relationships demand greater critical attention by scholars. To give just one example, the 2011 United Nations' World Drug Report estimated that the global illegal drug market is worth between US$300 and US$500 billion every year. Given this volume and scope, the drug trade and the prohibitions that structure it have come to dramatically influence the behaviour of states and national economies. Yet, figures like those of the United Nations are little more than conjecture, for there are no reliable sources or metrics by which to gauge the scale of illicit economies. The figures are thus consistently disputed, and the study of illicit phenomena continues to present profound challenges. By their very nature, the drug trade and other illicit activities evade monitoring and documentation; they operate beyond the reach of the typical information-gathering methods of researchers working within and outside of government. The drug trade and related black markets therefore present tremendous methodological and epistemological problems. We know they exist and to a certain extent we can study their effects, but we can rarely grasp them directly; often, we face considerable challenges in our attempts to do so (cf. Tunnel, 1998; Nordstrom, 2004).

Illicit economies of course are not limited to drugs. From petroleum to ‘pirated’ music to basic services like electricity, sanitation, and water, people across the planet depend upon and are tied into shadow markets of all kinds. The formal distinction between states and ‘illegal’ or ‘illicit’ activity therefore must also be troubled. This is so not only because ‘illegality’ is itself largely a state construct, but because, as Heyman and Smart (1999) argue, state actors actively participate in nearly every aspect of illegal markets, blurring the lines that would otherwise separate law and authority on the one hand, and criminal or illegitimate practices on the other. This participation may be authorized but secret, as in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm's secret trafficking of weapons into Mexico as part of an alleged intelligence-gathering operation (Conroy, 2012); it may involve complicity through lax or permissive oversight, as in the U.S. Department of Justice's 2012 decision not to criminally prosecute administrators and executives of banks like HSBC for laundering billions of dollars in illegal drug profits (Greenwald, 2012). Or, it may involve taking kickbacks and otherwise actively participating in illegal economies, providing ‘official documentation for loaded airplanes, freight trucks, and cars and allow[ing] traffickers to pass freely through airports and landing strips, freeway toll roads and desert highways, checkpoints and border crossings’ (Campbell, 2009, p. 23). And of course, the relationship between state actors and illicit economies may also combine or vacillate between all three modes of participation.

Inquiring into illicit economies thus involves asking questions about the relationships between spatial practices of illegality and their relationship to the ways that government actors conceive of the territory of the state, and where and when they police its diverse boundaries. Whether government officials, academics, or journalists, those who research or are directly implicated in the flows of illicit economies often employ a spatialized lexicon to describe their objects of analysis or intervention. In so doing, they attempt to map out what is generally unmappable for its fluidity – or, at least, only fleetingly capable of being rendered in cartographic or narrative form. But while their rhetoric commonly centres on questions of mobility in space, for the most part scholars have thus far overlooked questions of social space in their formulations.

The contributors to this special issue explore a diversity of topics, sites and approaches to the particular problems that come with researching illegality. Yet, they share in common an emphasis on both the problems these pose for methods and ethics, and on spatial conceptualizations of the social and political. With the exception of Heather Agnew's essay, these papers were part of a series of paper sessions that we (Banister, Boyce, and Slack, along with Dominic Corva) organized for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), in Los Angeles (Drugs, Deserts, Oceans, Wars: Researching Illegality and Legibility). The AAG sessions allowed us to begin addressing a series of specific questions that the authors included here have taken up in greater depth:

• In terms of research, what can be made of the relationship between territorial practices (official and unofficial), the entwined discourses of state sovereignty and security, and the actual work that these accomplish?

• How are lines between ‘state’ and ‘society’, or ‘law’ and ‘illegality’ drawn, managed, and patrolled?

• Given the information accessible to researchers, what questions can we reasonably ask and answer?

These questions have been taken up by the contributors to this special issue in different ways. Vanessa Massaro’s article (2015) draws from feminist and urban geopolitics to analyse the intricate negotiations required to live in and manoeuvre through the spaces of a Philadelphia neighbourhood targeted by police as a kind of ‘ground zero’ in that city's drug war. Massaro's work is richly ethnographic, drawing from oral histories and sustained interviews, and as such, it offers a much-needed counterpoint to narratives of victimization that seem to permeate scholarship on illicit economies and enforcement. Here, the space of the city block becomes a stake in residents' daily struggles for survival in the face of violence and police aggression. At the same time, its composition is also the outcome of those struggles.

With Michael Polson's (2015) piece, we move from the streets of inner-city Philadelphia to the foothills of the Sierras, in northern California, where marijuana production is challenging land-use regulation, police powers, and political views. Here, as in Philadelphia, the intimate spatial politics of drugs (in this case, cultivation) have become part of everyday life. There are struggles over property lines, arguments about home values, and the stigma of criminal activity, and philosophical debates about legalization. Communities like the one featured in Polson's investigation are caught up in the tensions created when largely abstract legal categories clash with the territorially rooted nature of cultivation.

Prohibition and the production and consumption of illicit substances are mutually constitutive processes, connecting people and places across the planet in highly uneven relationships of exchange. The outbreak of moral panic and subsequent banning of a particular substance produced in one place often leads to a desperate bid to find a substitute somewhere else. Drug synthesizers, moreover, are now sophisticated enough to stay a step ahead of the legal designations of particular substances, and when a given chemical composition is banned, another quickly emerges to take its place. Jonathan Taylor's study (2015) tracks this high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse between authorities and drug producers, showing how illegalization fuels an oftentimes dangerous experimentation, and in the past several years has dramatically reshaped long-standing geographies of production, distribution, and consumption.

Heather Agnew (2015) takes a close look at the phenomenon of femicide, or the explosion of female homicides, in Mexico and Central America in recent years. Scholars, journalists, and activists alike have tended to search for connections between femicide and the advent of neoliberalism and associated labour practices. In the case of Mexico, for instance, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in early 1994 would seem to coincide rather neatly with a spike in female homicides in the northern border region. Agnew's paper, however, challenges this more or less conventional wisdom. She argues that changes in the geopolitics of anti-narcotics enforcement, which pushed trafficking into the terrestrial routes of Central America and Mexico, unleashed a much larger wave of violence within which understandings of feminicidia must be situated.

The final paper in this collection, by Geoffrey Boyce, Jeffrey Banister, and Jeremy Slack (2015), draws from US State Department cables made public in 2010 by WikiLeaks to analyse discourses surrounding the officially declared ‘War on Drugs’. Anti-narcotics enforcement is rendered in explicitly spatial terms, and the rich WikiLeaks archive allows the authors to follow state actors in their struggle to materially and discursively isolate trafficking from its larger social, political, and institutional contexts. The article begins with the premise that the war on drugs is also simultaneously a war for drugs, one that has taken the lives of thousands of Mexican citizens. In light of this social and humanitarian disaster, the WikiLeaks documents contain frank and revealing assessments made by US and Mexican officials, who are often more concerned about the appearance of Mexican politics and government than their actual effects. The impression of a state that is responsible for and responsive to the needs of its citizens has been fundamentally destabilized since 2006, when Mexico's government, aided by unprecedented levels of US aid, launched its militarized anti-narcotics campaign. Yet, as the present controversy over the disappearance of 43 students in the southern state of Guerrero would indicate (Devereaux, 2015), both the US and Mexican governments remain unable to construct credible boundaries around the Mexican state that would meaningfully separate its agents and institutions from the contested terrain of the drug economy.

When we developed the series of sessions for the 2013 AAG Annual Meeting, we were struck by how few geographers have explicitly engaged the topic of illegality in their research, a topic that sister disciplines – history and anthropology in particular – have embraced with alacrity. Yet, no determination about the legality of a given person, process, or thing can be made without a space or set of spatial relations to which such a designation corresponds. It is our hope that this publication of Territory, Politics, Governance stimulates a much more serious and sustained engagement on the part of geographers on the territoriality of illicit economies and the spatial politics of enforcement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.